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Haas focused on improving quality control

Haas needs to improve its quality control in order to find more consistency, according to the team's chief engineer Ayao Komatsu.

In its first season in F1, Haas started impressively by scoring points in three of the opening four races. However, its form has tailed off since then, with just one more score in Austria to its name. Romain Grosjean has been increasingly vocal regarding brake and handling problems with the car - especially over team radio - and Komatsu says Haas struggles to replicate its performance race after race.

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"I think one of the problems is with consistency," Komatsu said. "We have very small amount of resource and a limited number of people. It’s not just getting one specification of the car – each component has to be put together really well and we have to monitor the quality and that area I think we really need to improve.

"Sometimes you’re putting on the same parts but the performance is not exactly the same. Sometimes our diagnostics are not good enough to understand what Romain is feeling straight away, so we really need to improve in every single area but we’re really working on that.

"With Romain, on the radio he’s quite an emotional guy but once he comes up in a debrief he’s very, very good. He’s got a really sense, he really helps us in understanding the car and where we need to go."

And Komatsu says Haas - which enjoys a close technical partnership with Ferrari and uses Dallara to manufacture many parts - needs to gain a better understanding of the car's behaviour ahead of the start of next season.

"For us really, trying to understand the fundamental things about the car, aerodynamics, tyres, that’s what we are focusing on, but again with our team being new, slightly inexperienced and still with all the analysis processes, data processes in their infancy we just need to start improving in those areas.

"We have really got to put our systems and process in place so we don’t have the same problems next year, so we can hit the ground running from February."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.